Il Martello [The Hammer], Vol. VII, No. 9. New York: Casa Ed. "Il Martello," 19 Marzo [March] 1921.

Carlo Tresca was the editor-in-chief (or equivalent) at several radical newspapers over his career, but the one that he founded and ran for decades — Il Martello — is the one most closely identified with him, and he with it.

Tresca founded Il Martello in 1917, and he directed it (with some interruptions due to poor finances) until his assassination in 1943.

As is evident from the broad range of writing genres it encompassed, Il Martello was not a traditional Italian anarchist newspaper or a “movement” publication in the specific way that La Questione Sociale (edited by Galleani and Caminita) was for anarcho-syndicalists.

Rather, Il Martello was too eclectic and unorthodox, like Tresca himself, to be classified according to conventional typology —“You can’t label him. You can’t classify him,” said Max Eastman in a famous profile in The New Yorker.

The personal affection that Tresca’s friends and colleagues had for him infuriated the more cerebral Galleani and his ultraloyal founders, who unfairly attacked Tresca personally when they were unable to do so doctrinally.

Carlo Tresca

Casa Ed. "Il Martello"

19 Marzo [March] 1921

Italian